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Google office API on the way

A Google product manager has announced that the company will soon be making …

Google product manager Jonathan Rochelle revealed last week that the search company plans to release developer APIs for its web-based word processing and spreadsheet applications, potentially enabling independent software developers to incorporate support for Google's services as a collaboration layer for desktop office programs. Rochelle told CBR, "we definitely want to build out APIs, especially for the spreadsheets side, as spreadsheets are more data-oriented, but maybe also for the word processor."

One of Google's goals is to facilitate mashups-- rich web applications that use powerful Ajax techniques to combine features from multiple web services. Rochelle hopes that users will be able to leverage the API to create additional services that complement the functionality presently implemented by Google. With the API, users will be able to work around potential limitations in the services and find creative new ways to benefit from Internet collaboration technology.

Web-based collaborative functionality is becoming an increasingly important feature for office software as users become less dependent on paper as a medium for distributing content. Microsoft has focused on incorporating collaboration tools like SharePoint into its productivity suite. Although Microsoft will probably not provide much support for Google's web services given the competitive implications, I fully expect to see third party Microsoft Office extensions that imbue it with the ability to support collaboration via Google's doc and spreadsheet applications. It is also likely that the technology will be embraced on the open source Linux platform and by open source word processing applications like Abiword and OpenOffice. Abiword developers are already in the process of adding collaborative Internet functionality, and could potentially incorporate support for Google's services with a plug-in. I can conceive of many other possible ways to leverage potential features of Google's productivity application API. For instance, developers could use FUSE to make remotely stored documents accessible as though they are stored on the local filesystem.

Despite the positive potential, I think there is room for skepticism. Google doesn't seem to have any sort of practical business model for this service yet. The company continues to acquire and develop services that have no immediately perceivable capacity to generate revenue, and it will eventually have to stop somewhere. It is hard to believe that the profit from Google's current advertising activities can subsidize all of these ad-free services for a sustained period, and one questions whether or not users are going to be willing to write documents next to advertising banners when Google does finally decide to incorporate advertising. The privacy issues are also worth mentioning. Are users really comfortable storing sensitive documents on a remote server? There are many questions to be answered, and the first of these is probably the hardest of all: APIs aside, will these online tools be able to succeed where other Office competitors have failed?